DOI 10.60531/INSIGHTOUT.2023.1.4| HAMMETT: WHAT FUTURE FOR QUEER COWS?_ INSIGHTOUT 1(2023)24By the same logic, I would argue that this definitionof queerness is also broad enough to include Holstein cows. If being fat is to flout normative standardsof beauty and health then being a Holstein cow isto flout characteristics associated with the“natural,”such as purity, wildness, and beauty. Holstein cowsdo not live easy lives, they are separated from theirchildren, often have diseases, have short lives andare killed once they outlive their usefulness. In thenext section, I will develop the notion of queer cowsby examining disciplines such as Science and Technology Studies that see animals as actors and QueerEcology that extends the notion of queerness to animals and the environment.Queering the Human andMore-than-HumanIn my research on cows, I examine how they figure innarratives of climate change, particularly as disturbances. Cows do not fit neatly into the category ofnature, nor that of culture; they straddle binaries andbecome disturbing. They are not seen as natural because of their breeding and domestication, and theydo not fully belong to culture because they are not humans. As animals who are bound up with technologies,they are queer creatures and are seen as a threat to“wild” animals because the land they inhabit is oftenlacking in biodiversity. In climate change debates,cows have become much maligned creatures for theirproduction of methane, which is the biggest source ofgreenhouse gas emissions from the agricultural sector. Such debates, by zeroing in on cows, often neglectto properly examine the global agrifood system andintensive farming systems that have contributed tomany of the issues that we are now facing. Within thedairy sector, the solution to reducing emissions is seenas quantification, control, and productivity.The discipline of STS has grown from a desire topursue a different take, especially in relation to theconducting of scientific practices. A central themewithin STS is the questioning of dichotomies suchas subject/object, nature/society, and another isworking to overcome certain disciplinary distinctions to foster multidisciplinary collaboration.17BrunoLatour once proclaimed that humans“have neverbeen modern”18. Modernity is a concept rife withtropes about the ingenuity of“man” and the primacy of humankind. In disavowing modernity, Latourhas sought to challenge these assumptions and inso doing make space for objects, animals and allthat is not human, as they had previously been neglected and marginalized.19Building on these foundations, Donna Haraway has gone on to declarethat not only have we never been modern but thatin fact, we have never been human, leading the wayfor a posthuman approach.20There have been numerous attempts to extend queertheory to nonhumans. Noreen Giffney has drawn attention to the ambiguity of the term“human” andbelieves it to be“both a discursive and ideologicalconstruct which materially impacts on all those whoare interpellated through that sign, especially those who find themselves on its margins or those whotransgress its boundaries”21. Giffney asks“whetherthe act of queering is always already a posthumanendeavour” and wonders what implications such apremise could have for queer theory.One discipline in which queer theory and the morethan-human have converged is queer ecology. Queerecology is interested in commonalities betweenqueer and ecological concerns, and interrogates notions such as health, purity, and toxicity that appear17See Andrew Pickering(ed.),Science as Practice and Culture(Chicago, 1992).18Bruno, Latour,We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter(Cambridge, MA, 1993).19See ibid.20See Donna Haraway,When Species Meet(Minneapolis and London, 2008).21Noreen Giffney,“Queer Apocal(o)ptic/ism: The Death Drive and the Human”, in Noreen Giffney and Myra J. Hird(eds.),Queeringthe Non/Human(London and New York, 2016), 83–106 at 55.
